Soil moisture plays an essential role in the Earth system. Reliable estimation of soil moisture, especially in regional and global scale, is important for climatic, meteorological and hydrological researches. This study presents a revised soil radiative transfer model (RTM) in which the vertical profile effects of soil temperature are included. In situ observations of soil moisture and temperature profile, measured during HIWater Experiment IOP, are used to formulate profile functions. The revised RTM is applied into the new AMSR2 soil moisture retrieval algorithm, in order to improve the algorithm performance in arid regions. By comparing the results of new algorithm against ground observations, the feasibility and capability of the revised algorithm and RTM were verified.